Among my most vivid childhood memories are two involving Princess Diana. She died not long after my sixth birthday, and I remember watching, unsettled, as my mother sobbed at her televised funeral. Weeks later, I remember crawling into my parents’ bed at night and begging them for a commemorative Princess Diana Beanie Baby. (It would have been a good investment: those stuffed bears go for thousands on eBay now.) I’m not British, and I never had a princess phase. Royalty never otherwise interested my parents, either. But Diana’s style, and the mix of relatability and confidence it came to reflect, made her unique. As the Princess of Wales and, later, the Prince’s ex-wife, she generated a mystique so strong it became a mythology. People around the world cared about her: they paid attention, and they felt as deeply for her as they might have if they knew her well.
In his new book Dianaworld: An Obsession, the critic, television writer, and biographer Edward White asks why that is. How did Diana, as a representative of a monarchy that many consider obsolete, attract such a tremendous audience? Why did so many relate to her so strongly when her life bore no resemblance to any ordinary person’s? And what does her enduring legacy—which ranges from those $2,000 Beanie Babies to dedicated “Dianaists” who believe she was murdered and lobby the British government to repent by declaring her birthday a national holiday—say about the monarchy, British style and identity, and the culture of memory today?
Although White is a biographer, these are not the questions of biography, and Dianaworld isn’t one. Readers unfamiliar with Diana’s life story, should there be any, will have to glean it around the edges here. Dianaworld is a social history with a very strong current of cultural criticism. White writes in his introduction that it’s “at least as much about the princess’s people as it is the People’s Princess,” but really, it’s much more about the former than the latter. He’s less interested in Diana herself than in the way her memory “has become entwined with… gay experience” despite her heterosexuality; in the sympathy that British Asians had for her despite the fact that she represented the colonial Crown; in the willingness feminists had to listen to her speaking “about the difficulties of being a woman in a world governed by men” although she never represented herself as a feminist. The more White researches Diana, the more projection and fantasy he encounters. “Dig deep enough,” he writes at one point, “and you’ll find a part of Diana that was Jewish, or an American, or a republican—or anything else that she wasn’t but you are.”
By republican, White means anti-monarchist, and he is one. He doesn’t fall into the trap of assuming Diana, too, secretly wished for the monarchy to be abolished, but he routinely lets readers know that he opposes its continuation. In doing so, he imbues the book with a bracing amount of skepticism and class critique. He can be especially sharp-tongued toward ex-Prince Harry, who “declares himself appalled by class distinction yet baulks at dropping his titles” and whose perception of his own importance White considers “‘[g]randiose’ ‘and delusional.’”
But Harry aside, Dianaworld is gentle toward its subjects. White never seems to suffer from the “compassion fatigue” that some Brits came to feel toward Diana. Instead, he allows her considerable charm to shine through—and to inform—all his analyses, and he never disrespects anyone who falls under its spell. In fact, his voyage through Dianaworld seems to have had something in common with how the Scottish writer Ian Hamilton Finlay described the mass outpouring of grief surrounding Diana’s funeral. “[T]here it was,” Finlay recalled: “you could see ‘the people.’”
Diana, objectively, came from a background ‘the people’ could not share. She was an archetypical “Sloane Ranger,” a member of London’s poshest–and least accessible–young social scene. Her family, the Spencers, were aristocrats famed for their ancient Englishness and twentieth-century sadness. White, as a republican, sets no store by “archaic notions of heritage,” though he’s interested to note that “breeding as an explanation of Diana’s magic comes even from those who profess themselves to be thoroughly modern people with no time for old-fashioned fallacies about class identity.” But he devotes more critical energy to the effect of the Spencers’ contemporary dysfunction, which included a number of messy marital breakdowns.
Diana’s own parents famously split on the heels of the legislation that introduced no-fault divorce in the United Kingdom, an event that became both a formative trauma for her and, given how many other couples divorced at the same time, an easy way for many Brits of her generation to relate to her. It also gave context to the emotional expressiveness for which she is, perhaps, best remembered. White cites the 1982 Sloane Ranger Handbook, a jokey guide to Diana’s set’s mores, which wrote admiringly that Diana “cried, she blushed, she swore… [Because of her] it was no longer COOL to be cool.”
Yet White is emphatic: when Diana was young, she wasn’t cool. The punk designer Vivienne Westwood and her partner Malcolm McLaren cringed when she came into their influential boutique; White writes, “Neither McLaren nor Westwood thought Diana in the least bit stylish, just a dreary fashion victim.” And yet so many women saw themselves in her style before her wedding to Charles. One London bridal shop had “two hundred customers signed up, sight unseen, for a replica of whatever it was that Diana would be wearing.” According to White, Diana, never especially interested in style, may have hoped for “a day when the public would ignore what she wore, [but] the devoted younger following she has amassed since her death have denied her that wish.” Indeed, women now copy her so relentlessly that on social media, a day crisp but sunny enough to wear her habitual sweatshirt-and-bike-shorts gym gear has come to be called “Princess Diana weather.”
White argues that the reason so many women dress like Diana, and, more broadly, the reason she’s retained such an enormous following, is that, especially once she got pregnant and became a “representative mother” for all of Britain, the media insistently described her as both an everywoman and a superwoman: ordinary yet untouchable, aspirational yet relatable. Of course, many women understand precisely how the pressure to “have it all” feels, which White notes. Mix in the perception of her as a “wounded child” that emerged from her parents’ divorce and generated a tendency to pity her, and the combination became irresistible.
One of Dianaworld’s most intriguing dynamics, in fact, is the frequency with which onlookers whose lives were much harder than Diana’s felt sorry for her. Not long before Prince William’s birth, Barbara Nicholson, a woman who shared Diana’s obstetrician and who had faced homelessness until late in her pregnancy, wrote in an open letter to the princess, “I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes… you will never be able to go up to the market like I can and buy daft hats or frilly dresses for the baby.” Until I read that line, I was baffled by the impulse to pity royalty, but thinking of the joy I take in buying my own baby “daft hats” made it click.
For White, the “daft hat” sentiment leads not only to empathy, but to the critique of the British monarchy that lies at the heart of Dianaworld. Supposedly, the Windsors are a “service monarchy,” a humble clan devoted to serving the people. In fact, they are “unelected [and] subject to no official system of accountability;” at the same time, their behavior is so intensely restricted by tradition that Diana, in White’s estimation, had no choice but to squash her ambitions and even her famous emotions into a generations-old vision of what was appropriate for the Princess of Wales. It was this squashing that made women like Nicholson pity Diana, who, luxurious as her conditions might be, lived a visibly outdated and constricting life.
After Diana’s divorce, she came to project more and more confidence: think of her famous “Revenge Dress,” which, White writes, not only “showed the prince what he was missing” but launched her into the public eye as a woman unashamedly seeking love. At this point in Dianaworld, White ranges a little too widely through her romances, her many humanitarian and charitable endeavors, her friendships with celebrities like Boy George and Elton John, and he seems far more interested in her capacity to move “up and down the social ladder as no royal had ever done—or been able to do—before” than in her no-longer-royal celebrity status. But his last chapters, which explore the world’s grief when she died and the conspiracy theories surrounding the accident that killed her, are as fascinating as the first.
As Diana’s life grows more distant, the myths that her public tells and trusts about her become more important. Through her, White writes, “the British invented a new way of fantasizing about themselves.” Diana herself may have had nothing to do with this, but her persona helped her audience sort through their thoughts about class, womanhood, modernity, and much, much more. Nearly a quarter-century after her death, everyone Instagramming their sweatshirts and bike shorts is, in a small way, doing the same.
